December 11, 2008 Daly City, CA USA

Getting the Books Ready 14 employees from the San Mateo office volunteered with the Bring Me a Book Foundation to help create a new library for a Daly City preschool.  After presenting the children with their new library the volunteers spent the day reading aloud to the children.  This initiative received a $1,000 CAT grant to help purchase the books for the library. 

Melissa Harris of Corporate Sales shares her story: After a brief introduction from Diane, the President of Bring Me a Book, and learning about the foundation's goals, purpose, and impact, we took a tour of the office and space where all of the books are housed.  We spent a short period of time covering new books with plastic wrap to get them ready for delivery to the destination where they were to be donated.  We loaded up the car and set off to go to the preschool in Daly City to present the new books to a class full of children.  After naptime, we greeted the four year old class and read a couple of books out loud to the class as a whole.  Doug Baudler read a book about a caterpillar and Melissa Harris read a book about a spider.  The kids sat and looked at the pictures, enjoying following along and answering questions that we occasionally asked.  We presented the book collection to the class, including books in both English and Spanish, as many of the children are bilingual.  While many of the salesforce team left, others stayed and read to the kids one on one.  Both Katie Yrazabal and Melissa Harris had the pleasure of reading books in Spanish to their new friends.  Doug Baudler also made quite a connection with one of the four year old girls.  I can say personally that the experience was extremely valuable and certainly reminded me that there is  a need to step away from work once in a while to extend a helping hand.  Having the opportunity to see the process from start to finish - from wrapping the books to presenting them to their new home - was extremely rewarding.